(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer network system including an information collector computer and, more particularly, to a computer network system including a plurality of information provider computers, at least one information collector computer and a communication network for connecting these computers.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A network system is known wherein a plurality of units cooperate for processing while monitoring the operating state of each other unit. If these units are connected therebetween by one or more of communication network, the monitoring operation is generally performed while exchanging the data based on a simple network management protocol (SNMP). If these units are computers and the information is stored in the computers, the amount of data to be exchanged between the computers is large to thereby cause a heavy burden on the network as well as the computers. If such a computer network system includes a large number of computers connected via the communication network, the burden on the communication network as well as the computers further increases.
In such a large-scale computer network system, it is not practical to use a single monitoring computer for monitoring the information stored in a large number of other computers, i.e., information provider computers, and thus a plurality of monitoring computers, i.e., information collector computers are used for monitoring the information in a distributed processing. For such a network system, a technique is known wherein if an information provider computer updates the information therein, the information provider computer transmits the updated part of the information to the information collector computer, for reducing the amount of data to be exchanged for the monitoring.
However, there is a problem in such a system that if there are a plurality of information collector computers, each information provider computer must know the presence itself and the addresses of the information collector computers monitoring the each information provider computer. This increases a heavy burden on the each information provider computer which has own task for processing.